Email Marketing Madness – Pop to the Left?

Posted on July 17, 2009

Today’s blog post is inspired by 2 or 3 emails I just happened to receive today.

Here we are in mid-2009. It’s been about 15 years since the world evolved from dialing up to long-distance bulletin board services. Today it seems that many, if not most people are “always on” with DSL, Cable and other types of Internet services.

Likewise, today most people have nice big 19″ or larger monitors with amazing resolutions. I remember a day when we had to make websites only 590 pixels wide so that you could view the site without scrolling. Today we have banner ads wider than that.

Things are progressing. People are communicating more efficiently, faster, more accurately, etc.

And yet… today I get 3 emails from different internet marketers with old fashioned “pop to the left” text. So here’s my reply.

Hey guys. Welcome to
the new millinium.

I realize that you’re
probably still eating
off of your Y2K left-
overs, but it’s 2009
now and people have
monitors big enough
to read actual para-
graphs of text.

Heck, we even have
cell phones that
can show full pages
of text and even full-
fledged websites.

So please throw
away your out-dated
Internet marketing
tutorials that tell you
that you need to send
me junk formated like
this.

The reason why text
emails still work is
because they look
like emails people
send directly to each
other.

Excuse me. But how
many of your friends
send emails to you
like this today?

I’m actually less likely
to read your text-only
message when it’s only
4 or 5 words wide with
hard returns!